This invention relates to the general method of tracking and notification system for the purpose of tracking of movement of people or objects in close proximity. The importance is that if an event is to be traced because of close contact, this system provides an efficient method of actually identifying the people or objects that are within this network during any given period so that testing and quarantine procedures can do done accurately and precisely.
For example, in a hospital environment, if there is a contagious disease outbreak and each patient, it is required to identify the people exposed to the infectious agent within a certain distance. If all visitors and staff in the hospital are tagged with proximity detection and identification device and their movements and locations tracked in a form of contact or proximity map and saved as a database. By retrieving the database records for the specified time, it is possible to isolate which staff member or other patients have been exposed to the particular patient, who has a positive test for the contagious disease result. It can be used for monitoring and control nosocomial infections which is responsible for many deaths each year in hospitals. This system and method provides you with a traceability of anyone who has come in contact with a dangerous disease and there is recourse to correct or contain such an event. Contagious disease such as tuberculosis, small pox, chicken pox, avian flu, Severe Acute Respiratory syndrome (SARs), etc. can be contained once the list of people, who are in close proximity with the infected patient, can be identified.
In another example, there could be a shipment of goods, which can be affected by the cargo placed near it. For example, radioactive substances, bio-chemical agents, bio-chemicals, contagious disease livestock, are cargo that would endanger other cargos etc.
In each case, you would not need to quarantine unnecessary people or cargos that are not exposed to the danger source. Furthermore, pinpointing the exposed people or cargo can be performed much quicker. In cases of emergencies, the database containing such information has to be updated, synchronized and self-reporting.
This invention also allows you to access notification reports from any local database through a distributed network servers using the Internet to replicate and synchronize its data.
The previous methods use to control the spread of infectious disease in a hospital or dangerous elements exposure are:    a) Blood sample testing all the hospital population including visitors,    b) Use indirect observations for those infected such as temperature measurement,    c) Quarantine all people who are on the duty roster working within the danger area.    d) Deploy surveillance camera throughout the hospital and record all activities
The blood sample testing of hospital population including visitors is an accurate method but is a very slow process since blood sampling takes time and its analysis also take significant amount of time before a determination can be made. If the hospital population is large, this method is determined impossible.
In the case of SARs, indirect measurements such as body temperature via thermal cameras are used to identify potential SARs carriers. However, not all SARs patients have these symptoms at the start of infection. Therefore many potential SARs carriers can still skip through.
Quarantine everyone working in the infected area does not account for those who are infected due to unscheduled visitors.
Bottesch describes the use of surveillance cameras to identify armed terrorist in U.S. Pat. No. 5,747,719 issued May 5, 1997. If such a surveillance system is used in the hospital on infectious disease and the affected area has spread due to infected carriers, then the volume of surveillance tapes and identification task can be very daunting.
Knosby uses trolley identification for the animal carcass in a packing plant for retrieval of where the animal comes from in U.S. Pat. No. 4,597,495 issued Jul. 1, 1986. However, there is no proximity map or method to trace all the events that carcasses are close to each other during the meat packing process.